Hard Drive Backup Lessons from Relentless on Vimeo.

1. Have Confidence

This is a hard one for a lot of designers, myself included. Confidence in yourself and in your work is absolutely necessary. Without it, you’re left with the feeling that whatever you’re designing will not be good enough. Once you’re confident in your own ability to do great work, you’ll see your better work start to show up.

2. Never Stop Learning

In an overcrowded market where new techniques, technologies and design superstars come and go, you’ve got to try your best to keep up. Staying sharp with the web and design world’s current technologies and trends is very important. If you’re still coding in tables and using drop-shadows on everything, this step should be most important to you. Make it a point to learn something, anything, every single day. You’ll talent will grow faster than you can imagine, and you’ll feel better about yourself along the way.

3. Use the Pen Tool

The pen tool is the lifeblood of any great designer, whether you’re doing raster in Photoshop or vector in Illustrator. I could go on for days about the pros of learning the pen tool, but you should probably just figure this one out for yourself.

4. Be Non-Destructive

Have you ever been working on a project in Photoshop, be it a poster, brochure, etc. only to get 100+ layers in wishing you hadn’t merged two layers an hour ago? There are groups and layer comps for a reason. Name everything. Save everything. Organize everything. If you ever need something, you’ll be able to find it.

In conclusion, I can’t guarantee that following these four steps will get you the most appreciations on Behance, but if you’ve got the eye and the natural talent, they’ll definitely get you on the right track.

If you’re in the marketing/advertising business or frequently peruse the internet, odds are that you’ve seen some pretty bad advertising. Maybe you have no idea what I’m even talking about, which is forgivable. Most people don’t know how to spot bad advertising. However, bad advertising is still advertising and, while it may work, it may not be as effective or as visually appealing as it could be.

The purpose of this is to try and help you understand why it’s important to plan your ads, as opposed to shoving copy down it’s throat until it suffocates. I hope to inspire you to brainstorm ways to create more intriguing ads with less copy and more kablam, while still being effective. Below, I’ve designed two faux ads just for this blog post.

Figure 1a: Cluttered Ad

Here’s our first ad. For the sake of this post, we’re going to pretend that the client, Ellis Labs, commissioned this ad from Relentless Media Productions. All of the content they would have provided us for the ad is visible, but it’s taking too much away from the design, which is how people will remember this ad. What can we do with this to give it some breathing room? In order to find that out I’ll show you my second ad and then we’ll pick them apart.

Figure 1b: A Cleaner Ad

Why is this better?

The tagline for the ad, “Express Yourself”, is more evident.  This is necessary because in just two words I can sum up the purpose of the product I’m selling: Expressing oneself. While taglines are not always present nor necessary, they are effective ways of achieving a “less is more” ad. Also, this tagline allows me plenty of ways to implement a visual metaphor into the ad, in this case the dancer. Design elements such as these not only look great, but also visually reinforce the tagline.

You’ll notice that some superfluous text has disappeared and that I’ve moved the informational content down to the bottom. These changes put more focus on the design element. The ad didn’t need a full features list because it already has good, informative copy. There’s also no need for me to list every single feature of the product, unless it’s something new and exciting that I’m helping to advertise. A laundry list of features, especially those common in your industry, does nothing for your ad except take up space.

You’ll also notice that, at the bottom, I’ve replaced the bit about the company with our main copy. I didn’t do this just to save space, however. This ad wasn’t designed to sell a company. It was designed to sell a product. If you are successful in selling your product, your company will reap the benefits.

Recap

So, what have we learned?

• Plan ahead. Think about the purpose of your ad and discuss it with members of your committee/board, while keeping in mind all of the things you’ve just read. Or, you could just hire us to take care of this for you.
• Be concise. If you’re advertising a product, try to do exactly that. Don’t try and cram in excessive information and/or information irrelevant to the product that you’re selling.
• Just enough is more. I say this because the perfect ad has just enough content to convey what you are needing to. The rest is up to your designer.

Hopefully you have a better understanding of what can make or break an ad. Depending on the success of this post, I’ll try to post more like this. Thanks for reading.

Microsoft has just announced that they will be donating eight meals to the homeless for every completed download of Internet Explorer 8. The campaign they are running is called “Browser for the Better” and Microsoft will only donate if the upgrade is downloaded from the campaign website.

This is good news for designers (and the homeless), for Internet Explorer 6 is a designer’s worst nightmare. I won’t go into why, but you can read this article if you are somehow clueless on this matter. While I don’t condone the use of IE8, it’s still worlds better than its retarded little brother. I recommend Firefox or Safari, but it’s up to you. Heck, download them all. Upgrade to IE8 to feed the hungry, but use Firefox because it’s the superior web experience.